Colonel Sidney Post and General John Bell Hood at Loftin Hill

The Union army got its warnings and sat on them. On November 29, 1864, Colonel Sidney Post watched Confederate columns head for Duck River and sent word to Schofield, while the cavalry commander James Wilson sent several messages of his own. Schofield did not believe them until dawn, when he finally understood that the artillery bombardment at Columbia was a deception. Hood's flanking force was already across the river, and a Union force raced north to hold Spring Hill that afternoon, in time to protect the village and its supply trains.

What the plaque says

Colonel Sidney Post and General John Bell Hood at Loftin Hill On this hill, mid-morning, Colonel Sidney Post, Commander of the Illinois 58th Union Infantry, observed the Confederate army preparing to cross the Duck River, southeast of this point at Davis Ford. He sent word to Maj. Gen. John Schofield that Confederate General John Bell Hood was flanking Columbia, headed northeast. By early afternoon, Hood sat on a log on this hill and surveyed the area as his army marched northward. Continued - Beyond lay the fertile valley of the Duck River and the town of Spring Hill. Later that night, the Union soldiers slipped by Hood's troops near Rippa Villa, a Greek Revival plantation home with 75 enslaved people and 15 enslaved structures. When Hood arrived the next morning, he understood that his well-orchestrated maneuver had failed. The next day, the armies met at the Battle of Franklin.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Mink Slide and East 8th Street — 3.8 mi
  Columbia's Black business and church district south of the courthouse square, where on the night of February 25, 1946 a white mob gathered and Black veterans stood guard.
• James K. Polk Home and Museum — 4.0 mi
  The 1816 brick house in Columbia where Polk practiced law and campaigned for the legislature, now a museum that also tells of the people the Polk family enslaved.
• Henry Horton State Park — 15 mi
  A Duck River park on Governor Henry Horton's former farm in Marshall County, with a mill ruin from 1845, kayak floats and the grave of a governor the House declined to impeach.
• Gordon House and Ferry Site — 18 mi
  A brick house of 1818 beside the Duck River at milepost 407.7 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, where a Chickasaw partner and a Tennessee captain ran a ferry and an inn.

More markers nearby

• The Reverend Edmund Kelly — 3.7 mi
• Freedmen's Savings Bank and Trust Company — 3.8 mi
• Joseph Brown — 5.1 mi
• Columbia Military Academy — 5.1 mi